Shoegaze Renaissance
Why shoegaze is making another appearance in the music and mainstream scene.

I was scrolling through my Instagram’s feed and saw a video of a girl where she typed out a ton of text on the screen talking about how she wishes guys would dress. The video was fine, it showed a lot of loosely unbuttoned shirts and wavy curly haired dudes from Pinterest, and then her crazy reaction to the MattyBRaps look-alikes. But what really caught me off guard about this whole thing, and the reason why I stayed to watch the video a few times, was because of the audio she used. It was one of the hardest tracks I had ever heard in one of the most random things I have ever seen, a Love Sosa/my bloody valentine remix.

2x.nikz · Love Sosa X When You Sleep MASHUP | Chief Keef, My Bloody Valentine

Not only did I never expect to hear Chief Keef on a shoegaze track – I thought Lil B was the only one that could pull it off – but I could never have imagined that a video like the one I watched would ever use a shoegaze track for its audio. I think now, we’re experiencing an exciting time where there has been a sort of shoegaze renaissance. The toe curling, meat grinding, industrial vacuum sounds that are synonyms with the genre are not only just penetrating the mainstream, but are also being created in mass quantities by contemporary bands.

In a world run by social media and technology, people are able to be involved with new niches and obscurities every day. Individuals don’t have to live near a scene to be a part of its culture anymore, people can simply experience these topics and subjects online. It’s like the anime “Serial Experiments Lain” in the sense that there is no need to leave the internet because everyone is so plugged into it and experiences so much through it. I no longer need to sell all of my possessions, move to a random place in the middle of nowhere in search of inner peace or in a quest to find myself, I can just do it vicariously through someone else.




There is definitely something to be said about having first hand experiences and forming your own opinions through your actions – people should touch grass and be healthy and have friends and maintain relationships with others. But there are so many logs of information and foreign atmospheres that can be internalized and personalized by a user through just online consumption.

But maybe it’s because of the Kafka nihilist inside of me – a lot of the time I feel like I shouldn’t have to deal with all of this digital content that’s constantly shoved in front of my face. It is a draining feeling, despite how much I choose to be on the internet. I love learning and experiencing through the digital world, but it is so intermingled with useless and dog-water content that only fills my mind with waste and annoyances.

Usually when I log off of my computer or put my phone in my pocket after a two hour scrolling sesh, I feel drained and used. And I know I’m not the only one in this boat, my friends are always complaining about their personal addictions to technology that they feel like were pushed onto them involuntarily at a young age. My friends have also told me that it feels like they are losing their mind when they lay awake at night by the worst, Aphex Twin-like, twisting and contorting amalgamation of TikTok sounds that continuously ricochet in their head like a pinball machine whenever they try to sleep. Even though there is so much learning that can take place in the digital world, there is also so much of it that is pointless and destructive. It would honestly be better to turn off your phone and stare at a blank wall like Kingpin than to let these repetitive, high-toned brain rot videos and sounds run through your mind like malnourished vermin. But as explained through my friends’ experiences of being unable to sleep because of trendy social media sounds and songs, silence is not the solution. There needs to be the opposite of that in order to put up walls between you and the problem – noise.



Shoegaze is a response to the overstimulation that our media-infused generation is facing. It is a 40-foot oceanic wave that swallows us up and tosses us to a small deserted island with an overgrown palm tree and alabaster white sand. Shoegaze doesn’t offer a solution to the problem of overstimulation, your head is still filled with noise, but it’s a different type of sound. It’s numbing.

Shoegaze offers a release from the pointed talons of the media and lets the listener lay back in its continuously moving current of noise like a cold, violet tinted, lazy river in the middle of the night. It allows for everything else to drop away from the individual. The things that once occupied the forefront of someone’s mind are discarded to the side through the genre’s grinding gears and deep lulls. Although the music is not a permanent fix to our generation’s content overload, shoegaze allows for people to be distracted for at least a few minutes from the media’s energy-sucking leeches.

New shoegaze bands like Julie, They Are Gutting a Body of Water, Trainsurfing, Tremintina and many others are making their voices heard and are expressing their frustrations with our current ways of living. Similar to Shepard Fairey’s original intent for his brand Obey, shoegaze grants us the opportunity to turn our attention away from the media’s many dominating trends and lets us reevaluate our actions and personal habits.



A few days ago, I was eating food in a crowded restaurant where I saw a screaming child be met with an illuminating peace offering from his uninterested parents, an iPad with a chunky case and “Cocomelon” YouTube playlists queued up. The kid immediately stopped his tantrum as his hands reached upwards to grab this token of stimulation from his parents.

I see moments like this and think of how much of my own life is dominated by pointless and crippling media, and then drown it out with the static filled, reverberated drums and inaudible vocals of shoegaze. The problem is still there, but at least I, and thousands of others, have the ability to momentarily escape from it through this genre. Which is why I think shoegaze is making waves in the mainstream media and the music scene again, because it is the perfect vehicle that collectively expresses our current frustrations with how we are treated by, and interact with, the media industry and certain social practices.